Amazon has announced a $199 7-inch tablet called the Kindle Fire running a …

Amazon has announced a new tablet called the Kindle Fire and a $99 Kindle Touch at a press event today in NYC. Like the successful Kindle e-reader, the Kindle Touch keeps its e-ink screen, but both the Kindle Fire and Touch now integrate heavily with Amazon cloud storage.

The $199 Kindle Fire is a full-color, TI OMAP 4 dual-core tablet running a customized version of Android that will have cloud access to movies, songs, and Android apps. The tablet has a 1024x600 resolution, is 11.4 millimeters thick, weighs 14.6 ounces, and uses Amazon's Whispersync service to access a "carousel" of media selections, and users can "pin" favorites from the cloud to their device.

A new browser called Amazon Silk is included on the Kindle Fire that "lives" in part on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service, which helps the tablet to load web pages very quickly. Silk stores common files from around the web in cache on EC2, allowing it to pass them to the Kindle Fire to speed up load times, and can predictively load content for your next page click.

The Kindle Fire will not be capable of 3G access (fitting, given that it passes media and data back and forth to the cloud with abandon). The cloud storage is supplemented by 8GB of local storage on the tablet.

The new Kindle Touch weighs 5.98 ounces and does not have a capacitive screen; instead, it uses infrared sensors to accept touch input. The device is about the same size as previous Kindles and no longer sports a keyboard. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, stated at the event that Kindles will now store books for free in the cloud, and will have an "X-ray feature" that precaches information from dictionaries and Wikipedia that is relevant to the displayed text.

The $99 version of the Kindle Touch will be WiFi-only, and a $149 version with 3G access will also be available. Bezos also noted that there will be $79 non-touch version of the Kindle for customers who "don't want touch." Amazon says that the new Kindles turn pages 10 percent faster than before, and though they are smaller, they still have the same 6-inch screen as the previous Kindle.

All prices stated above are for the "Special Offers" versions of the Kindle, which display ads while the readers are inactive. The WiFi-only Kindle Touch without ads is priced at $139, and the Kindle Touch 3G without ads is $189. Currently, there doesn't appear to be a "Special Offers" version of the Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire ships November 15. The non-touch version of the new Kindle ships today, while the other two touch versions are available for pre-order now and ship November 21.

136 Reader Comments

$199 for a 7" tablet seems like the price that people have been asking for for a long time. However how much of that is achieved by tying in the user to the platform so tightly that it makes Apple look good?

$199 for a 7" tablet seems like the price that people have been asking for for a long time. However how much of that is achieved by tying in the user to the platform so tightly that it makes Apple look good?

Yeah, a lot of people speculated that they'd try to get into the "general" tablet market, but I was pretty confident that whatever they came up with would just be a Nook Color competitor.

It would be interesting as an option to root and use as a cheap tab (much like the $199 NC refurbs) but with no camera...meh.

Hopefully the two will be pushed to compete with each other in the breadth of non-reader apps available now...that was one failing of a stock Nook Color.

I wonder how much of a loss leader this'll be, I was expecting a $299 or $249 price point. At any rate, I'm very curious to see the specs on this. And I agree, this "heavily customized" version of Android doesn't bode well. I hope Amazon takes this seriously and doesn't load this thing up with useless garbage.

Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon will announce a new $199 tablet called the Kindle Fire at a press event today in NYC. The WiFi-only tablet reportedly bears many similarities to the company’s successful Kindle e-reader, though it is running a heavily customized version of the Android operating system.

So is it $99 or $199? And where in the article does it indicate that this has an e-ink screen? At $99 with e-ink, I'd buy in a heartbeat - using the Kindle App on my iPhone and laptop is hard on the eyes.

Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon will announce a new $199 tablet called the Kindle Fire at a press event today in NYC. The WiFi-only tablet reportedly bears many similarities to the company’s successful Kindle e-reader, though it is running a heavily customized version of the Android operating system.

So is it $99 or $199? And where in the article does it indicate that this has an e-ink screen? At $99 with e-ink, I'd buy in a heartbeat - using the Kindle App on my iPhone and laptop is hard on the eyes.

The article seems to be in mid-edit because your seeing something that we all have already read with a different title.

Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon will announce a new $199 tablet called the Kindle Fire at a press event today in NYC. The WiFi-only tablet reportedly bears many similarities to the company’s successful Kindle e-reader, though it is running a heavily customized version of the Android operating system.

So is it $99 or $199? And where in the article does it indicate that this has an e-ink screen? At $99 with e-ink, I'd buy in a heartbeat - using the Kindle App on my iPhone and laptop is hard on the eyes.

$99 is the new e-ink reader. B&W. $199 is (presumably) the new (color) tablet.

nash076 wrote:

I think Amazon underestimates the XDA community; this thing will have a custom ROM in record time, Vanilla Android, sans ads.

$199 for a 7" tablet seems like the price that people have been asking for for a long time. However how much of that is achieved by tying in the user to the platform so tightly that it makes Apple look good?

Heh, Amazon will never be able to come close to Apple when it comes to user buy-in lockdown. I don't really know much about how their video service works, but for music, there's no DRM at all (and almost always cheaper than iTunes), and for books, they do of course have DRM, but there's a Kindle app for just about everything (except the Nook), so it's not exactly restrictive.

Troublesome Strumpet wrote:

They lost me at "heavily customized version of Android". Maybe I'm just cynical but that processed as "bloatware bloatware spam spam bloatware buy Amazon!".

It's obviously going to be tailored toward pushing Amazon stuff, but I don't think they'll make the same mistake that RIM did by gimping the hardware with bloated software. They're too smart for that.

I think Amazon underestimates the XDA community; this thing will have a custom ROM in record time, Vanilla Android, sans ads.

Indeed. If this isn't running a locked bootloader (a la Motorola) this will be running Cyanogen Mod in days. 200 bucks for a 7" sounds pretty decent to me I may have to look into a couple of these floating around the house..

Seven inches is too small [TWSS!]. Before I had a tablet, I thought 7" would be fine; I even thought that 10" might be too big. Now that I have a 10" iPad, I sometimes think even that is too small...

I have an iPad and a 7" HTC Flyer. As I've posted before, the form factors are for completely different things.

* 7" is the right size for reading something like a book. You can hold it in one hand and comfortably read a page of text. 10" wants to be on your lap or a on desk... preferably with one of the cases that gives it a 20 degree tilt. This is why all the dedicated e-readers are 7" or smaller... big-screen readers have never sold well.

* 7" lets you thumb-type just fine. 10" wants you to set the thing down and use both hands.

* 7" fits in any pocket. 10" wants to be carried, unless you've got a jacket with really baggy compartments. Remember that 7" is roughly half the size of a 10" device.

I'm not saying that 7" is better than 10", but they're very different.

$199 for a 7" tablet seems like the price that people have been asking for for a long time. However how much of that is achieved by tying in the user to the platform so tightly that it makes Apple look good?

Heh, Amazon will never be able to come close to Apple when it comes to user buy-in lockdown. I don't really know much about how their video service works, but for music, there's no DRM at all (and almost always cheaper than iTunes), and for books, they do of course have DRM, but there's a Kindle app for just about everything (except the Nook), so it's not exactly restrictive.

So other than the Kindle app vs. the iBooks app they are identical. Sounds close to me.

Allomancer wrote:

Troublesome Strumpet wrote:

They lost me at "heavily customized version of Android". Maybe I'm just cynical but that processed as "bloatware bloatware spam spam bloatware buy Amazon!".

It's obviously going to be tailored toward pushing Amazon stuff, but I don't think they'll make the same mistake that RIM did by gimping the hardware with bloated software. They're too smart for that.

My guess is that all that backend EC2 stuff will actually be feeding some nice software that will allow them to really target ads, possibly better than Google can since they are on the retail end as well. And this might actually let them be even less intrusive since I'm sure the Amazon purchasing interface will be streamlined to make it so easy that not using it would be troublesome. Win, win for Amazon.

Remember kids, rumours have it that this Kindle Fire launch is to catch some Christmas sales and get rid of some stock left in the China factories after the Playbook bombed so badly. There's a better one coming in January!

They lost me at "heavily customized version of Android". Maybe I'm just cynical but that processed as "bloatware bloatware spam spam bloatware buy Amazon!".

I don't doubt it will be. But not obviously so. This is an Amazon device for reading, media, and buying products (I'm going to bet) from Amazon. To hit this price point (and depending on the actual hardware involved), Amazon would need for the cost to be made up elsewhere.

It will be a closed system (mostly) that's tied to fulfilling your needs through Amazon. Not that you won't be able to load a webpage from say Sears and order from them. But why do that when you're already logged into Amazon via the Kindle and just have to click "buy now".

Any bloatware will be there apps: Amazon App Store (which I already have issues with, so they need to get that cleaned up a little bit), Amazon MP3 Store, and whatever other apps they've developed.

I'm not dissing it. It sounds like a great device - especially the lifetime Whispersync if it includes streaming, and I'll probably get one in a year or two. But you can't expect it to be a vanilla computing device.